From the Domesday Book to Shakespeare’s Globe
The Legal and Political Heritage of Elizabethan Drama
Dominique Goy-Blanquet
- Pages: 456 p.
- Size:156 x 234 mm
- Illustrations:1 col.
- Language(s):English
- Publication Year:2023
- € 120,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-2-503-60131-1
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- € 120,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-2-503-60132-8
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Explores the strong interconnection between England’s unique legal system and Elizabethan theatre, and how this links into claims of independence from Europe.
Dominique Goy-Blanquet is professor emeritus at the University of Picardie, France, and a member of the editorial board of En attendant Nadeau. Her works in English include Shakespeare’s Early History Plays: From Chronicle to Stage (OUP, 2003), Shakespeare in the Theatre: Patrice Chéreau (Arden, Bloomsbury, 2018), essays for Shakespeare Survey, Cambridge Companion, Moreana, Law and Humanities, and most recently a chapter on Tudor lawyers in volume 6 of A Cultural History of Law, edited by Gary Watt (Bloomsbury, 2019).
The phrase ‘Jus Uncommon’ summarizes England’s claim to independence from Europe, a claim supported by its unique legal system and Elizabethan theatre, and their strong interconnexion. Elizabethan tragedy begins at the Inns of Court. It was no mere coincidence, but a result of the long history of intersecting processes of law, politics, and theatre. This book sets out to contextualize and explore such legal and literary intersections, charting the emergence of Elizabethan legal culture from its various English and European sources over the course of the four hundred years running from Magna Carta to Shakespeare. It encompasses the major strands of legal history and culture that formed the background to Elizabethan political drama, republican tradition, theories of monarchical sovereignty, European and English theories of imperium, pedagogical and rhetorical practices of the Inns of Court, legal-antiquarian research, parliamentary privilege, and Tudor political pamphleteering.
Legal texts, discourses, and social practices constructed a pervasive intellectual culture from which Elizabethan drama – like Shakespeare’s – emerged. Shakespeare is not the central object of this study, but he is central to its argument. What he knew about law was what collective memory had stored from centuries past at home and abroad. The issues, characters, themes, theories, and metaphors dramatized by the Elizabethan playwrights followed the way opened at the Inns. Emblematic figures of lawyers-writers and their Senecan patterns paved the way to Gorboduc and to Shakespeare’s histories.
Editorial Note
Introduction : Law or Liberty?
Part I. Jus uncommon. Freedom of the State
Chapter 1. Dreams of Empire
- Early Steps to Singularity
- Clashes of Jurisdictions
- Sacred Monarchy
- English Democrats
- Good Counsel
- Model Parliaments
- Right of Conquest
- Roman Law
- The Common Law of the Realm
- Emergence of the Inns
- Upward Mobility
Chapter 4. Learned Counsel
- A Display of Legalism
- The Courtly Muses of Europe
Chapter 5. Divorcing Rome
- King’s Conscience
- King’s Printer
- King’s Games
- Common Prayers
- Heretics on Trial
- ‘Something Tawdry’. The Political Pageant
- ‘An Axe or an Acte’. The Execution of Justice
Part III. The Conscience of England. Freedom of Speech
Chapter 7. The Languages of Law
- The Legal Nursery
- Won in Translation
- Dramatic Justice
- Political Tragedy
- ‘Shall Cassandra Bee Punished?’ The Liberties of the House
- Clean and Unclean Money
- The Lawyer’s Glasses of Governance
- Lawyers in Resistance
- A Parliament of Voices
Conclusion. ‘This Magnificent Theatre of Heaven and Earth’
Select Bibliography
Index of Acts, Statutes, and Treatises
Index of Plays, Poems, Dialogues, and Masques
General Index